Wednesday, March 05, 2008

"We are all Hizbullah now"

Harold Evans, writing in the Guardian unwittingly foretold the future.

"We are all Hizbullah now," proclaimed one of the banners at the Stop the War coalition's London march. Really? Is it possible that more than one person has taken leave of their senses?

Unless the state can resume its historic role as the protector of the public everyone will eventually take "leave of their senses". In Ashkelon, Israel, resident Moshe Nissimpor decided:

that the best way to halt rocket fire from Gaza - in light of what he terms the government's failure to do so - is some vigilante justice. Nissimpor developed a homemade 200-millimeter ballistic missile which he planned to launch from Ashkelon into the Gaza Strip.

"From this day onwards, we will push back to the stone age every place which dares shoot missiles into Israel's sovereign territory," he said Wednesday. "It is time the world understood Israelis' lives are not expendable."

The Balkanization of society, if continued indefinitely through identity politics, globalization and political correctness, may eventually take things to the point where no consensus over public policy is possible. When that happens, formerly public goods will be provided privately.

John Robb argues the key driver of change today is the publics' loss of confidence in the ability of the US government -- and probably all other governments -- to manage common threats. He predicts the emergence of a new tendency to privatize even national security. In a speculative scenario to illustrate his points, Robb writes about police plans, bounty hunter teams and transnational private justice:

The success of these enforcement efforts has been amplified by recent
judicial changes that have automated the conviction of perpetrators based on recorded acts. This allows these certified teams to carry out the death penalty at the point of capture. We expect that these efforts will reduce the effect of disruptions drain on the national economy by five percent of gross national product by 2030 (which should be sufficient to allow economic growth to return).

Unfortunately, there have been indications that bio-terrorism is on the rise, with the worst incident to date occurring in San Antonio during the summer of 2023, inflicting some 300,000 casualties. Significantly, most of the information required for these acts have been developed by criminal groups located outside of the US for financial gain through extortion and other forms coercion. To prevent terrorists from inside of the US from acquiring this information and to slow the growth of criminal activity, national security licenses have been issued to international vendors to intercept these criminal elements within their countries of origin and terminate their activities. Time will tell if these efforts at early intervention will work. Regardless, we are hopeful.

A few posts ago I noted the actions like those of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, who plans to release a film criticizing the Koran, would soon force European authorities into the whack-a-mole mode. When the state loses the moral authority to combat terror groups it loses it across the board. The inability of the state to stop violence by substate actors will inevitably lead to corresponding defensive measures by networked communities. Maybe all cities will one day come to resemble Third World cities, like Baghdad, with neighborhood watch groups and checkpoints between districts. The ultimate expression of a multicultural society are urban mazes of gated, privately-patrolled ghettos.

Much earlier I wrote that the logical flaw in assuming Islamic radicals, developing WMD in a cave, could privately attack the Western civilians with impunity was the assumption that Western civilians couldn't do the same. "The really harmful consequence of not recognizing proxy warfare and addressing it openly is that it creates a subterranean world of countermeasures. A black market in defense."

39 Comments:

Indeed. Speaking of proxy warfare, but on a larger scale, Haaretz reported today that Iran is shipping long-range missiles to Hizb'allah through Turkey.

Sometimes I think the West is like the guards in Monthy Python and the Holy Grail, watching John Cleese, in the role of radical Islam, run straight at them, but he always appears to be far off. Then, in an instant, he's on them, hacking everyone in sight.

I'd like to think the blogosphere plays a tiny role in "civilians taking defensive measures" by getting the word out.

The challenge is to get the state out of the nanny mode and get it back to supplying the basic commodity of collective security. Otherwise we will resurrect the landscape of the Middle Ages in the 21st century.

In the first instance this will mean re-inventing culture. Culture must once again become an important pillar of society. Custom, rather than law, is the least intrusive mechanism for preserving society.

*"From this day onwards, we will push back to the stone age every place which dares shoot missiles into Israel's sovereign territory," he said Wednesday. "It is time the world understood Israelis' lives are not expendable."*

If only Charles Bronson were still alive to play this guy in a movie. Good for you, pal. I would recommend that before you try to educate the world, though, try convincing your own government of the fact that your life has value.

I, for one, can't wait for this inevitable breakdown to occur. Instead of patrolling my part of the wild-west as a mere rifle-armed deputy, just think of the armaments we'll all be able to carry. I wonder if 2023 Toyota Rav4s will come standard with a .50 cal?

"The ultimate expression of a multicultural society are urban mazes of gated, privately-patrolled ghettos.."

Hmmm - Worried we're heading toward "liberal fasicsm" couter-intuitive nonsense here. Bourgie multi-culturalism can be problematic for a democratic polity and truly various city life...In NYC it sometimes seems like a cover for gentrifiers who are pushing working class people of color out of Manhattan (and Harlem in particular). But, minus historical context and nods to about "white flight" and the history of segregation (especially up South) the equation of gated communities with multi-culturalism in America seems pretty aburd.

ON the related point re privitzation. There's a pretty standard left investigative report out now titled "War on Terror Inc." Has at least one twit praising it, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have some real Ike-style dope on dangers of military-corporate complex. I remember, on this score, Ralph Peters' great line re Rummy after Abu Ghraib. Noting the, ah, unhelpful role private contractors had played in the prison, he accused Rummy's DoD of "outsourcing America's honor." Johnny Mac will do better here than Bush. I bet Obama will too. Unlike Hill, he's not locked into the the privatizing neo-liberal mode that's ruled both parties ever since Nordquist began pressing to shrink the size of gov till he could drown it in a bathtub...

The challenge is to get the state out of the nanny mode and get it back to supplying the basic commodity of collective security.

See, I just can't help thinking that you're overlooking the huge role vigilantism has historically played in most societies.

In both America and Australia, you had what were basically outlaws taming the wilderness, before the arrival of "justice", law and government.

Citizens have historically formed themselves into posse's and taken care of the bad guys among themselves by themselves, either personally or by hiring outside talent like Wyatt Earp to come in and clean up Dodge (can anyone say "Blackwater"?).

Government is made up of bureaucrats. Not only are bureaucracts slow, but they are usually also remarkably meek ... not the sort of folks you want to send out to face down the bad guys at high noon.

Government *can* wage war well, because it has the mass to do so, once the inertia is overcome to get it to move.

But increasingly, it seems to me that in depending upon our "governments" to protect us from Muslims both internal and external, we're making a huge mistake. We need agility and flexibility to face individual jihadists who use the cloak of human shields to move around in.

It seems to me that individual citizens have that agility, and that the best defense against jihadists is a good offense. The Israeli's who are talking about firing rockets back into Gaza have the right idea. Abbas says he can't stop Hamas because he doesn't know who's doing it. Why can't Olmert (and the Israeli government) say the same thing? That they have no idea which civilian Israeli's are shooting rockets into Gaza, so they can't possibly stop the practice.

I predict that once the dams of vigilantism burst in one country, the practice will sweep the globe, and Muslims will be set upon by their formerly cowering neighbors right and left. Without the assistance of a handcuffed police force, without the assistance of flummoxed courts of law, and without government approval.

Since what we're doing as a civilized society obviously isn't working, then we need to try something different so I have absolutely no problem with giving frontier justice a try for a while.

It is impossible at this point to get the State out of Nanny Mode. Careers like Obama's, Hillary's, etc. are based on it. And all the patronage that flows down from it. Outside Hollywood, most of the upper class bastions (Academy, Government, Media etc) are based on the Government in full Nanny Mode.

Culture will never be the default mode until the upper classes are destroyed or diminished. One of the most frightening things about 9/11 to the Upper Classes was that firemen, police officers, and later blue collar construction workers were more important than media and academic bigwigs.

Unfortunately there's another phase we have to go through first, and it's not pretty. We're there in lots of ways already.

This is where the state tracks down and penalizes its own citizens for the same behaviors it allows the enemy to get away with routinely, on the state's own territory.

The state ends up doing this because its own citizens are effectively documented and tagged, and its legitimate citizens hold their assets in places where the state can identify and track them. Immigrants and the illegals on the other hand operate informally and in the shadows, via kinship groups, moving backwards and forwards to and from their home countries, and are difficult and expensive to identify and to sanction.

Thus do the state's own citizens end up being second class citizens in their own countries.

A relatively little noticed way in which this happens is building restrictions in big cities. In the UK for example doing any sort of legitimate development is massively expensive and just about anything a private citizen is likely to want to do with a property which increases its density is effectively prohibited. The web of complex official restrictions are not however in practice enforced against certain tightly knit immigrant communities, and so they effectively end up with privileged access to real estate assets and the unique ability to increase densities, which generates very profitable returns.

This is how high density urban immigrant concentrations are generated in London and Paris - via the state's inability to evolve its control mechanisms fast enough to be able to target them on anything other than its own citizens.

This is of course shooting yourself in the foot in a big way, and political multiculturalism both makes it worse and is quickly taken up as a tool by our enemies.

The police in the UK are now in fact just too afraid to enforce laws against certain immigrant communities even at the same level as they police traditional residents, for fear of being accused of 'racism', a 'disproportionate response', etc. They frequently don't even want to accept reports of crime in which the perpetrators are identified as being from the 'wrong' groups.

This is the reason none of these private responses will be going anywhere. In fact I feel sure this guy building rockets in Ashkelon will be receiving a visit from the IDF very soon, and they won't be leaving him in possession of any of his rockets.

The only solution for Gaza is to replace the Arabs with a Black African tribe, preferably Christian, which has an historical claim to the turf. The Africans could use all the same silly right-of-return nonsense the Arabs use. The Eurps and the NYT would be immobilized. Because Black African trumps Palestinian on the victimhood scale the Africans could kill Palestinian Arabs with impunity, which is a good thing.

The risk would be worthwhile. Gaza would make a great resort area, and the Israelis would invest heavily in economic infrastructure. Win-win for the good guys.

In the meantime, Moshe Nissimpor will have his rocket confiscated, and he will end up doing 10-20 years for some crime or another.

You act like you think those folks aren't civilized, Boston.---Report: Syrian Man Butchers Baby Nephew in Supermarket A Syrian man decapitated his 15-month-old nephew with a knife before his mother's eyes at a supermarket in Jeddah."He chopped off the boy's head in front of the mother to get back at her."

As tribes, small groups, and individuals become more and more powerful, it seems that conflict inevitably becomes less the sole prerogative of states yet more destructive. Think about the classic Sci Fi fantasy: an intelligent house with robot servants, a flying car, a food synthesizer, and its own inexhaustible power source. In 20 years that becomes a powerful design tool with a weapons-delivery platform, a nano-assembler that can make and kind of nasty bug or poison, and a high-energy weapon of mass destruction.

If today's world is the thesis and the world 20 years from now the antithesis, what then is the synthesis? Some of the things that come to mind are a technology suppressing totalitarian state; massive space colonization (so unless you can detonate the sun, no one madman can wipe out the human race -- at least until it can colonize other solar systems); or trusted networks of individuals and tribes that police themselves against bad actors (something like Neal Stevenson's Diamond Age world).

In all of these three scenarios, a lot of people probably die while building the new synthesis. The high risk avoidance types (Guardian readers and other socialists) probably go for scenario 1. Libertarians would probably go for scenario 2. I like scenario #3 since it involves people negotiating, cooperating, and working together still, which I find to be essentially human. Big Brother and paranoids living in orbital fortresses just don't appeal to me much.

None, not one, of the Israeli State's give-backs to these savages has brought security or stability to the region. The elites in Israel and the United States have never heard of "hudna" or "jihad" or "taqiyya and kitman." The only thing they know how to do is to meekly take out the checkbook and keep underwriting the violence and incompetence of these savages. Even paying the jizya has had no calming effect in the neighborhood.

The People have a right of self-defense when the State has run away and been remiss in its duties.

I think that, cummulatively, Israel's neighbors have been in a constant state of warfare against Israel for every year of its existence, and even before that. It's time to fully recognize that the enemy cannot be bought off or morally constrained. I would be one hard **s and just turn the troops loose on my enemies on all the borders. And never give the land back. Never.

Nomenklatura, that only works for a while, that is punishing the rooted and easily punished majority native citizens and leaving immigrants and "protected status" groups alone.

Eventually, resentment builds among the majority. Who are punished and controlled why hostile and exclusive racial/religious networks that are both alien and that they can never join are cosseted by the elites.

That would be a "pre-revolutionary" state. One ripe for a Napoleon, Franco, Cromwell, Mussolini, or other "protector of the people." Who objectively are oppressed by a minority and elites.

Some of you may have never envisioned The Belmont Club as a People's Information Support Team, or the commenters as irregular propagandists or counterpropagandists, but IMHO this site and others are key bases for the counter-jihad in the War of Ideas in cyberspace.

I consider Wretchard a cyber guerrilla chieftain in a pantheon of virtual militia leaders and irregular information operators.

If we are all HB now when will I be receiving my $300 million in weapons from Iran?

While I guess that many or most people know that HB, Hamas, IJ and other terrorists get their money from Iran in order to do Iran's bidding it seems to slip people's minds a lot. They act as if HB and Hamas are autonomous organizations that set their own agendas. They don't, not really, and the hidden hand of Iran is behind their actions. At some point Israel or the US, no one else really cares, is going to reach the tipping point and attack Iran. Until that happens most of Israel's fighting against its near enemies won't really matter. It's the far enemy that matters.

On the Beiruit to the Beltway blog those Lebanese slackers want to know why Israel doesn't attack Syria, once and for all. They are kinda biased and of course changing the govt in Syria would make things a bit quieter in Lebanon. But really, Israel needs to cut off the head of the snake in Teheran. Until that happens we may not all be HB but HB will be a danger to us all as Iran's proxy.

This article, The Gaza Bombshell, in Vanity Fair offers a sad history of US/Gaza policy. The author's intent is to insult the Bush administration and particularly Bush, Rice, and the "neocons" but assuming the article isn't made up out of whole cloth it doesn't provide a picture of the US administration and State Dept as being very smart or effective in its middle east policies and actions. At any rate it gives a history of how we've gotten to the current situation.

Whiskey_199, the history of WWII in Europe is quite instructive in this regard.

Basically, the elites in the UK and France led both countries into an impossible strategic situation in the 1930's, stepped back to let ordinary people fight and endure through the war, and then stepped smoothly back into positions of power as soon as the war ended. In France for instance it became a joke how during the war the Resistance had only a few thousand members, but one week after the liberation it suddenly had over a million.

This is a cultural feature of Europe, long established and correspondingly hard to modify. Ordinary people over there are used to being ruled by largely hereditary aristocracies, and defer to them most of the time. Even their revolutions are transitory phenomena which (like 1968) usually lead to the installation of a new generation of masters under a system which functions remarkably like the old one.

I agree that the end result may well arise from a convulsive shift in opinion among ordinary people, which the elites won't like. I just don't think we may yet be close to seeing it. Also, don't expect to see much action by private individuals acting independently of the state in Europe - Europeans don't even know what that kind of freedom means. American history is full of that type of freelancing, on both defense and offense (it was how life was lived on the frontier), but Europe's history is not.

I don't go for the tribal senario long term, and what has evolved in the Gaza is a poor man's version of Mad Max. At some point the chaos factor spun by the Islamists will either have to be put down in orderly fashion, or a new order will reign.

Unless what is evolving is beyond human ability to manage (global markets managed by states combined to regulate non-state and other state actors to mutual benefit) then we are at the end of an era and will have to reconcile to a new dark age. If we cannot focus enough to manage self defense, then perhaps we are not ready for this evolutionary step.

Responding to fellow reader Vincep1974 in the previous comment stream, I posted a 14-paragraph treatise, but now I find that the points are just as apt to the issues in "We are all Hizbullah now."

I apologize to readers who have patiently scrolled past some of these points a few times previously, but it seems we're always engaging new readers in the comment stream at Belmont, and there are some concepts that need regular restating.

I would also recommend that folks take a look at Steven Den Beste's analyses of the rationale underpinning the current conflicts threatening civilization as we know it. His essential library can be found at his site, denbeste.nu.

Even if the assertions in these writings by several other authors don't immediately commend themselves to you, they are some of the clearest insights, mostly free of doctrinaire baggage, you will come across anywhere.

Den Beste is a pretty competent writer himself. His analysis of how's cum we invaded Iraq has a passle of insights, arranged in a compelling logical framework.

Wretchard,Hard SF author Vernor Vinge, cretaor of the concept of the technological singularity, plays with the empowerment of of individuals & small groups by technology (for good & bad) at the expense of traditional governments in The Peace War, where the discovery of a sort of impenetrable force-field bubble technology he calls "bobbles". The bobbles persist once made, so it becomes a good way to make your enemies go away.

He follows this future up in the highly relevant short story "The Ungoverned"Wikipedia summary:"The framework is the story of the Republic of New Mexico (NMR) invading the peaceful anarcho-capitalist utopia in Kansas. The NMR creates a military fiasco by completely failing to understand the cultural differences — including the amount of self protection a lone Kansas farmer may have."full text here

Further OT, What's really cool is that Vinge follows up in Marooned in Realtime, where it has been discovered that the bobbles *do* pop later, sometimes a *long* later (based on size) -- and stop time on the inside. Itbecomes a time travel story of sorts, but one that stretches over millions of years, as those who come out find they missed the Singularity and broader humanity has gone without a clue.

Closer to home, Vinge's recent Hugo-winner Rainbow's End is *highly* recommended as a near future (next 20-30 years) story, even though its perhaps better read for the informed speculation than a regular narrative drama.

FWIW, Vinge has a remarkable record for prescience -- his story True Names which defined many issues of the Internet era actually predates the WWW, as well as Stephensons better known Snowcrash, by quite abit.

All schools controlled by Hamas are now legitimate targets for war or reprisal. The question is whether Al-Azhar University becomes a legitimate target for war or reprisal if it gives any material or spiritual support for Hamas.

I think I remember a post that was a bit more on point regarding the basic issue. I'll try to drag it out of my aging mind.

Me thinks this poor sod will fabricate a missile that will pretty much hit its target the first time, eh. We are talking about 60 year old technology. And, if the missile fails than he can use a little process improvement to make it better and better.

My guess is that the local police and military will be - for some odd reason - rather unable to track this chap down.

The police in the UK are now in fact just too afraid to enforce laws against certain immigrant communities even at the same level as they police traditional residents, for fear of being accused of 'racism', a 'disproportionate response', etc. They frequently don't even want to accept reports of crime in which the perpetrators are identified as being from the 'wrong' groups.

This is the reason none of these private responses will be going anywhere. In fact I feel sure this guy building rockets in Ashkelon will be receiving a visit from the IDF very soon, and they won't be leaving him in possession of any of his rockets.

After the election dust settles, stand by for renewed waves of gun control in the USA.

The State must assert a monopoly on the use of force.

Then I wouldn't be surprised when the West is wracked with major civil wars with elites and their enforcers being butchered by super-empowered individuals with homemade superweapons.